Parler is an American alt-tech social networking service associated with conservatives. Launched in August 2018, Parler marketed itself as a free speech-focused and unbiased alternative to mainstream social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. Journalists described Parler as an alt-tech alternative to Twitter, with its users including those banned from mainstream social networks or who oppose their moderation policies.
X Pro, formerly TweetDeck, is a paid proprietary social media dashboard for management of X accounts. Originally an independent app, TweetDeck was subsequently acquired by Twitter Inc. and integrated into Twitter's interface. It had long ranked as one of the most popular Twitter clients by percentage of tweets posted, alongside the official Twitter web client and the official apps for iPhone and Android.
WhatsApp is an instant messaging (IM) and voice-over-IP (VoIP) service owned by technology conglomerate Meta. It allows users to send text, voice messages and video messages, make voice and video calls, and share images, documents, user locations, and other content. WhatsApp's client application runs on mobile devices, and can be accessed from computers. The service requires a cellular mobile telephone number to sign up. In January 2018, WhatsApp released a standalone business app called WhatsApp Business which can communicate with the standard WhatsApp client.
iMessage is an instant messaging service developed by Apple Inc. and launched in 2011. iMessage functions exclusively on Apple platforms – including iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and visionOS – as part of Apple's approach to inter-device integration, which has been described by media outlets as a means of achieving vendor lock-in. iMessage is accessed and used using the Messages app client.
Vine was an American short-form video hosting service where users could share up to 6-second-long looping video clips. It was originally launched on January 24, 2013, by Rus Yusupov, Dom Hofmann and Colin Kroll. The company was bought by Twitter, Inc. in October of 2012 for $30 million. Twitter shut down Vine on January 17, 2017, and the app was discontinued a few months later.
The history of Twitter, later known as X, can be traced back to a brainstorming session at Odeo.
Signal is an open-source, encrypted messaging service for instant messaging, voice calls, and video calls. The instant messaging function includes sending text, voice notes, images, videos, and other files. Communication may be one-to-one between users or may involve group messaging.
Periscope was an American live video streaming app for Android and iOS developed by Kayvon Beykpour and Joe Bernstein and acquired by Twitter, Inc. before its launch in March 2015.
Mastodon is free and open-source software for running self-hosted social networking services. It has microblogging features similar to Twitter, which are offered by a large number of independently run nodes, known as instances or servers, each with its own code of conduct, terms of service, privacy policy, privacy options, and content moderation policies.
Deplatforming, also called no-platforming, is a form of Internet censorship of an individual or group by preventing them from posting on the platforms they use to share their information/ideas. This typically involves suspension, outright bans, or reducing spread.
COVIDSafe was a digital contact tracing app released by the Australian Government on 26 April 2020 to help combat the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The app was intended to augment traditional contact tracing by automatically tracking encounters between users and later allowing a state or territory health authority to warn a user they have come within 1.5 metres with an infected person for 15 minutes or more. To achieve this, it used the BlueTrace and Herald protocol, originally developed by the Singaporean Government and VMWare respectively, to passively collect an anonymised registry of near contacts. The efficacy of the app was questioned over its lifetime, ultimately identifying just 2 confirmed cases by the time it was decommissioned on 16 August 2022.
On July 15, 2020, between 20:00 and 22:00 UTC, 130 high-profile Twitter accounts were reportedly compromised by outside parties to promote a bitcoin scam. Twitter and other media sources confirmed that the perpetrators had gained access to Twitter's administrative tools so that they could alter the accounts themselves and post the tweets directly. They appeared to have used social engineering to gain access to the tools via Twitter employees. Three individuals were arrested by authorities on July 31, 2020, and charged with wire fraud, money laundering, identity theft, and unauthorized computer access related to the scam.
Koo was an Indian microblogging and social networking service, owned by Bangalore-based Bombinate Technologies. It was co-founded by entrepreneurs Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka. The app was launched in early 2020; it won the government's Atmanirbhar App Innovation Challenge which selected the best apps from some 7,000 entries across the country.
Bluesky is a decentralized microblogging social platform. The platform was created by Bluesky Social, a public benefit corporation based in the United States, as a proof of concept for the AT Protocol, a communication protocol for decentralized social networks. Jay Graber serves as the company's CEO and XMPP creator Jeremie Miller sits on its board of directors.
Truth Social is an alt-tech social media platform owned by Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), an American media and technology company majority-owned by former U.S. president Donald Trump. It has been called a "Twitter clone" that competes with Parler, Gab, and Mastodon in trying to provide an alternative to Twitter and Facebook. Truth Social uses Mastodon as its backend.
Business magnate Elon Musk initiated an acquisition of American social media company Twitter, Inc. on April 14, 2022, and concluded it on October 27, 2022. Musk had begun buying shares of the company in January 2022, becoming its largest shareholder by April with a 9.1 percent ownership stake. Twitter invited Musk to join its board of directors, an offer he initially accepted before declining. On April 14, Musk made an unsolicited offer to purchase the company, to which Twitter's board responded with a "poison pill" strategy to resist a hostile takeover before unanimously accepting Musk's buyout offer of $44 billion on April 25. Musk stated that he planned to introduce new features to the platform, make its algorithms open-source, combat spambot accounts, and promote free speech, framing the acquisition as the cornerstone of X, an "everything app".
On December 15, 2022, Twitter suspended the accounts of ten journalists who have covered the company and its owner, Elon Musk. They included reporters Keith Olbermann, Steven L. Herman, and Donie O'Sullivan, and journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and The Intercept. Musk cited an incident between "a crazy stalker" and a car with his child as a justification for the suspensions. Posters on behalf of the owners of the accounts said that the suspensions were permanent. On December 16, 2022, Musk stated that account access would only be restricted for seven days and on December 17, 2022, some accounts were reportedly restored with Musk citing Twitter community polls as the reason for the reversal.
Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter in October 2022; Musk acted as CEO of Twitter until June 2023 when he was succeeded by Linda Yaccarino. In a move that, despite Yaccarino's accession, was widely attributed to Musk, Twitter was rebranded to X on July 23, 2023, and its domain name changed from twitter.com to x.com on May 17, 2024.
Spoutible is a social media and social networking service created by Christopher Bouzy, the founder of the Twitter analytics service Bot Sentinel. It launched in February 2023.
Threads is an online social media and social networking service operated by Meta Platforms. The service features integration with Instagram and users must register for Threads with an Instagram account. Functionally it is similar to Twitter: users can post text, images, and videos, as well as interact with other users' posts through replies, reposts, and likes. The application is available on iOS and Android devices; the web version offers limited functionality and requires a mobile app to be installed first. Upon its launch, Threads became the fastest-growing consumer software application in history, gaining over 100 million users in its first five days and surpassing the record previously set by ChatGPT. This early success was not sustained, and the user base of the app plummeted more than 80% to 8 million daily active users by the end of July 2023.
